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3D printing your wedding ring

Shapeways community member Alec Cox designed his wedding ring in Blender and had it 3D printed in silver.

Alex writes:

[Caitlin and I] went to the same high school but have gone to different colleges (she goes to MIT, I go to a school in Ohio) for undergraduate, so 3D printing has given me the ability to create our rings where distance has taken away the traditional ritual of shopping for rings together. While I initially tried to smelt the rings myself, this resulted in a pile of useless silver slag and a whole heap of danger concerning oxy-acetylene torches.

So, while I have no experience at all with smelting metal, I have a little experience with the 3D modeling program Blender. This let me add the amount of personalization to our rings that we wanted while keeping the price-point down (you know how crazy expensive wedding bands get). While I kept my wedding ring a simple toroid scaled in the z axis (with not that many faces), I added a ton of resolution to her ring so that I could use the sculpt tool in Blender to write a line from a Beatles song on the inside (a mutual love of the Beatles is part of the reason we started dating).
The quote in the ring is "Love you forever and forever" from the song "I Will."

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I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-)

My wife and I were married on November 11th, of 2011. And I actually designed a ring for me and her in Blender but the time it would have taken to print them and ship them missed our date... :/ But now she has 3 on her finger soo... haha. Awesome to see the idea being used. +1

I did almost the same thing in December... but it was a wedding gift for my friends just married, and instead of a ring, I made a small statue with 2 dogs and their names (friend's not dogs), I had not enough money for the Silver version, so I ordered in White Strong & Flexible (plastic). It was nice and they liked.

Another option is to print the ring in plastic and then have a jeweller cast it in whatever metal you want (eg gold). The 'lost wax' casting method actually uses 'lost plastic', but that doesn't have the same ring to it! When jewellers are using 3d printers, this is the technique they use - print the ring in plastic, then cast using the sacraficial printing. I wrote up some notes on how the process works on my blog if you are interested: http://www.wekadesign.com/blog/?p=1

We tried 'lost plastic casting', but found that it doesn't burn out as cleanly as wax. At Shapeways we use a very high resolution wax printer to print the original (and we're looking in to offering the wax models for sale, too).